The most awesome emulator of all time, puTTY.exe, just got even easier to use. Along with loggiong automatically into a SSH session add the Windows shortcut that loads a saved session and launches it, now you have one click shell access to your Linux host from your Windows PC.

So, you have a Windows system that gets a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) during bootup, and you can’t see what it says before it disappears. Not a big deal, except that the system won’t boot into safe mode either, so you can’t do the regular method, using the Windows GUI, to set the system properties settings so that the system does not automatically reboot when the blue screen appears. Yikes! Well, if you want to stop the system from rebooting beforee you can get the STOP: codes, and find out how to fix the problem, here is a really neat way:

As many web developers can attest to, logging into your server through SSH (Secure Shell) is one of the more common day-to-day tasks (you can even use it as a secure tunnel for your traffic). It only makes sense to automate this process which in turn can save many many keystrokes.

This how-to is written with PuTTY and Windows in mind and requires several other tools that are available from PuTTYâ€™s website. So from their download page, make sure you have these files:

PuTTY (putty.exe)

PuTTYgen (puttygen.exe)

Then to automate SSH login, do the following:

Run PuTTYgen.

Select SSH-2 DSA as the Type of Key to generate.

Click generate and move your mouse around to generate randomness.

Click â€œSave Private Keyâ€ and save it somewhere on your computer.

Copy the entire content inside the box to your clipboard (this is your generated public key).

Login to your SSH server.

Create the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys containing the generated public key (from step 3) on a single line.

Make this file readable (chmod 755).

Then open up PuTTY and navigate to Connection->Data and fill in the auto-login username.

Navigate to Connection->SSH->Auth and under Private-key, browse to the file you had saved earlier on your computer.

Thatâ€™s it! Now you can try logging in to your SSH server and it shouldÃƒâ€š login automatically. If it works, make sure you save your session so you donâ€™t have to repeat these steps every time!

Hopefully these steps work for everyone! Let me know if there are any problems.

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Had some problems with a CentOS5 server not accepting keys… found that this server was being finicky for some reason, and used this article on how to generate the keys on the Linux server, and then import the public key to the client Windows box. To make it automatically login simply do not enter any passphrase. This is probably a huge security risk or something like that, but if you’re using it on a secured LAN then perhaps it’s ok.

Can’t run System Restore in normal mode or safe mode, can’t open programs

Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\…

Stop: … {Registry File Failure} The registry cannot load the hive.

System error: Lsass.exe
When trying to update a password the return status indicates that the value provided as the current password is not correct.

Resolution:

A. Boot the system into the Recovery Console and CHKDSK

1. Insert the Windows XP cd into the top cd drive
2. Turn the computer off
3. Setup the computer to boot from cd: either by pressing F2, F9 or Delete to go in BIOS or by pressing F12 on Dell computers to launch the Boot Device Menu
4. As soon as you get the message Press any key to boot from the cd hit enter.
5. Wait ~3 minutes for the Windows Setup to initialize
6. At the Welcome to Setup screen press R to repair windows using recovery console.
7. Wait a couple of minutes while setup examines the hard drive.
8. You will be prompted to choose a Windows installation. Press 1 on the top of the keyboard and then
9. You will be prompted to enter the Administrator password. Press Enter if no password was set.
10. Perform a disk check:

chkdsk /p
fixboot

11. Type exit to restart the computer.
12. As soon as the computer starts hit F8 every second to bring up the Advanced Options Menu.
13. Choose the Last Known Good Configuration.
14. If these steps didn’t resolve the issue go back in Recovery Console.

B. Perform the System Restore
Inside the Recovery Console type the following commands to change the directory to the system restore directory:

cd \
cd system~1

If you get an Access Denied error:click here
If you don’t get an Access Denied error :

cd _resto~1

If there is no _resto~1 folder or if there are no restore points inside it:click here

If the _resto~1 folder exists, inside it there are several folders named RP1, RP2. These are restore points. RP1 is the oldest restore point. You can use

dir

to view what RP folders are available. If no restore points are available click here. Otherwise choose the most convenient RP folder. Supposing we have RP3 available let’s type in:

cd rp3

Change the directory to snapshot:

cd snapshot

Restore the main registry branches. If you are being asked if you want to overwrite type in y to agree.

In a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet cell one can use a custom function to effectively grab all test after the final (last) occurrence of a particular character or string. This is accomplished by simply creating a Custom Function and then using that function in a cell formula. Following is the code and instructions for how to create and then implement the function.

Insert a new module by right-clicking on ThisWorkbook > Insert > Module or on the toolbar clicking Insert > Module

Paste the clipboard contents (which is the code above this numbered procedure) into the code window by pressing CTRL-V, or by right-clicking in the code window and on the popup menu clicking on Paste, or by clicking the menu toolbar on Edit and clicking on Paste.

Close the Visual Basic Editor by presing CTRL-Q, or by clicking File on the menu toolbar and then clicking Close and Return to Microsoft Excel.

The custom user defined function is now available to be used in the formulas of cells. To use it, the following syntax format is used in the cell’s formula:

=PullAfterLast(A1,"yourstring")

Of course, replace yourstring with the appropriate character or string.

When a website user makes a search with WordPress,Â the search results typically are shown using the search.php template file. If one chooses to do so, these results can incluse an automatically “grabbed” image thumbnail generated by the images contained in the image. Posts with no images can show a default generic image instead. And this can all be done using the Get-The-Image plugin and perhaps a bit of code tweaking.

For input, if the FIELDS ESCAPED BY character is not empty, occurrences of that character are stripped and the following character is taken literally as part of a field value. Some two-character sequences that are exceptions, where the first character is the escape character. These sequences are shown in the following table (using â€œ\â€ for the escape character). The rules for NULL handling are described later in this section.

The pesky carraige return and new line characters, while providing a way to present text for human viewing, are not always desirable when working in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org.

'Created by Chip Pearson
'Cleans up data by removing tabs and carriage returns in worksheet cells.
Sub CleanUp()
Dim TheCell As Range
For Each TheCell In ActiveSheet.UsedRange
With TheCell
If .HasFormula = False Then
.Value = Application.WorksheetFunction.Clean(.Value)
End If
End With
Next TheCell
End Sub

In modern Microsoft Windows operating systems and all Unix / Linux systems the system clock time can be set automatically. The computer will connect to a special server on the Internet called a Network Time Protocol server, and get the current universal time, and then adjust it according to the local time zone on the computer. It keeps the computer clock very accurate and corrects drift before it can become much of a problem.